


my heart's like yours

by Ronabird



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, F/M, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, and scandalous teenage kissing, drabbles and concepts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 5,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21754087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ronabird/pseuds/Ronabird
Summary: Stella settled when he was twelve.
Relationships: Callum/Rayla (The Dragon Prince)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 112





	1. [1-1] step-prince. (Callum)

**Author's Note:**

> My hand slipped and now I've got 5k of daemon AU drabbles. help.

Stella settled when he was twelve.

That’s kind of young. Not, like, _impressively_ young, or _worryingly_ young, but it usually happens to kids who have to grow up kind of fast. It makes sense it would happen to an important kid, a prince of the kingdom—

Except Callum is just the prince’s stepbrother. When he sees King Hallow and Rowan pacing the halls, looking like _two_ great gilded lions, he’s extra aware of that. When he lingers in the courtyard and looks up into his mother’s stone face, the statue of a bear beside her, he wonders what she would have thought. If she’d be proud of him.

The shape of his soul is nothing more impressive than a blue jay.

“It’s useful,” Stella tells him, the first week. When she hops on his shoulder, he can feel every little movement of her tiny toes and her tiny wings. He feels like they’re both made of twigs, too breakable. “We can get in and out of anywhere! We have _dexterity_.”

“We don’t _go_ anywhere,” he reminds her.

“Well, if you’re on horseback, I’ll be in the sky!” she tells him. “It’s a tactical advantage.”

That would require him to successfully _be on horseback_. Callum groans.

“And corvids are clever,” she tells him. “We’re the smartest non-magical birds there are.”

“That’s crows,” he sighs, and drapes himself on a banister over the courtyard, head on his arms. He looks down at his stone mother and her stone bear, with paws the size of Stella’s whole fragile body. “Crows which are _mail carriers_. Just give up, Stella. We have the soul of an incredibly average person.”

Three weeks later, Soren settles at fifteen. He laughs everyone out of the courtyard unless they stop to admire his form. Atlas is always at his side, kicking and tossing his new rack of polished antlers. Callum _swears_ red deer aren’t supposed to be that big: like a slender, show-offy horse. No one seems surprised.

Claudia comes last. No one is surprised by what she turns out to be, either. Asher has been snakes, snakes, and nothing but snakes for a couple years now, since her training really started. His final form is beautiful. He’s an asp the color of smoke and midnight: there’s a purpley kind of undertone to his charcoal scales, broken by delicate little patterns of deeper black. Callum could look at him _forever_.

An asp could kill a blue jay. A stag wouldn’t even need to.


	2. [1-2] servant. (Viren)

“I have tolerated your arrogance for too long,” says Harrow.

The king is a large man, and when he stands, Rowan shifts forward with him. The lion’s bulk makes him seem three times as grand: all darks and golds, red undertones and warm gilding. Those massive paws hardly make any sound on the castle’s stone floors, but still Viren can’t help but keep the lion out the corner of his eye.

“You will know your _place_ ,” says Harrow, and Rowan bears fangs the size of small white daggers. Viren snarls back, and on his shoulder, Circe’s talons dig in sharply enough to risk the fabric. He doesn’t wear any sort of shoulder pad; he wants it known that he is too crisply self-contained, too precise, too measured in his emotions—or so it should be. Not so now, with the goshawk beginning to mantle its wings out, red eyes fixed on that stupid enormous bulk of cat.

“ _On your knees_.”

Circe’s talons clench such that they draw blood somewhere beneath the delicate embroidery. His shoulder pulses with pain and it is _sweet_ in his fury. Viren glares with all the blazing intensity of a goshawk, glares like he wants to take the arrogant cat and its arrogant man _apart_.

His friend. A fool. An emotional, pigheaded idiot who won’t even let his life be saved—won’t let Viren use an ounce of his brilliance, his hard work, the hours and unending nights he’s _slaved_ to keep this idiot _alive_ —

He kneels. Circe’s beak is parted, her wings trembling, her feathers standing bristled with rage. He feels blood beading on his shoulder, beneath his clothes, in the grip of her razor-sharp talons.

He holds his tongue. The goshawk is livid, he feels it in his mind. But she is silent, too.

“You are a _servant_.”

Harrow’s lion snarls.

Viren thinks, _and you are a useless dead man._


	3. [1-2] corruption. (Viren)

Viren takes the glowing butterfly in his hand, and he savors the feeling. Its little life against his palm has a _thrum_ to it, a gentle sense of energy and spirit. Magic. The fuel for all the miracles he can enact.

He smiles, small and pleased and private, when he crushes the little life in his hand.

It does not die as a butterfly should: it bursts to golden sparks like a dying daemon, in a way that disturbed him, once. Years ago. These days, he is used to the thrill of energy in his palms, that electric live-wire feeling that is so foreign and rare.

When he crushes the butterfly, he can breathe easier. It is a rush of exhilaration unlike anything.

Viren’s daemon shivers on his shoulder. Just as the spell wipes away the corruption from his face, it takes the damage from her plumage, too. Without the illusion, she is like a ghost: the color of ash, frayed and ragged at the edges, with an unhealthy dark glaze to her eyes. Now, as that shiver of electricity runs through them, she shakes out her feathers and they are new again. The sleek and creamy grays of a goshawk, her eyes a brilliant red.

They make a very handsome pair. A worthy trade for a butterfly. After all, they need to be at their best to navigate this… difficult political landscape. It wouldn’t do to give a bad impression.


	4. [1-2] fear. (Callum)

In the first moment Callum sees Rayla, he screams.

Well. He’d call it a yell. He’d call it a shout of surprise, because—

Because he turns expecting Ezran, bright and goofy and bad at sneaking anywhere, even with a daemon that can still be a butterfly or a mouse. He turns expecting his bright-eyed little brother, and what he gets is...

What he gets is a cloaked figure without a daemon.

She doesn’t have a daemon.

She’s just— _alone_.

When she drops the hood to show her pointed ears, her horns—and the bare emptiness around her, the way she looks like just a part of a person, like somebody cut in half—

He stammers. He backs away. His mind is blank and humming with panic, and Stella is on his shoulder, huddled against his neck. She doesn’t like it. _He_ doesn’t like the swords, but she’s starting to tremble just because of the pointy-eared half-person in front of them—

He tears down a tapestry to distract her, and he runs.

Stella flits alongside him, and for a second he’s so grateful that he has a bird for a daemon, even if she isn’t big and strong enough to stand against soldiers and assassins. She dodges and swoops around the clanging suits of armor he topples in his wake.

“Come _on_!” calls the jay, and gods is he not going to argue.


	5. [1-3] shackles. (Callum)

“Callum, what are you _doing_?”

Claudia looks at him all shock, wide-eyed and genuine. He claps the shackle over her wrist. Asher is on her shoulder, reared up and hissing, but he wouldn’t strike at Callum. Not ever. Not even right now, with—with this.

Stella still flutters backwards out of range, off his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Claudia,” he says, and runs.

“We’ll come back for them,” Stella whispers to him, flitting alongside through the dark hallways. “Once we figure this out—after it’s over—”

But they don’t, in the end.


	6. [1-4] monster. (Callum)

“Boys, get away from her,” signs Amaya and says Gren. Their daemons stand tense and still at their sides: his bay hunting dog, her long-antlered oryx. Even for being a prey animal, Sala is the one that’s most daunting to look at. Her eyes are dark and careful, fixed on Rayla even as Amaya won’t look away from Callum.

He can’t stop thinking of what it would look like if Sala charged, if she ran Rayla through on those elegant dark points. He’s sick with imagining it.

Maybe—maybe he needs to say something just as awful, to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“Wait!” shouts Stella, fluttering from his shoulder. She swoops and flutters around him as he steps forward, playing up their agitation. Playing up their fear. It’s not hard.

 _She’ll kill us,_ he signs, _and drink our blood. And cut out daemons to dust._ “So you have to let us go,” he finishes aloud, feeling Stella’s hopeful flutter back onto his shoulder.

There is a beat of silence.

 _Take her out,_ signs Amaya to her men.

His heart drops.

When they fire the arrows, Rayla spins and twists and bats them away. Rayla moves so fast and flexible she’s like a snake. Rayla—

All the breath goes out of him.

Rayla has a knife to his throat, and to Ezran’s. He feels the heat and hard angles of her close behind him. He feels the heat of… of her arm, crowding Stella against his throat. Pressing against the jay’s wings, her feathers. Rayla’s bared _skin_ pressed to the feathers of his _daemon_.

The heat of her. The, the—the electric, awful, aching shock of contact, _pressing_ in so close and claustrophobic—

He is dizzy with it.

Ez makes a startled little noise, but Amais is by his foot in rabbit-shape, safe and untouched. Callum breathes shallow and careful, and watches Amaya watch him. Watches Sala tremble, just once, with what must be anger. It must be on his face, what this feels like.

Maybe that’s what sells it.

It only lasts a second. When Rayla jolts them backwards, Stella flutters free, swoops around them just to feel the safe cool air on her feathers. He and Ez stumble along with Rayla, blindly, as she backs them into the woods.

When it’s safe to turn and run, Stella flies back to his shoulder and clings there. He raises a hand to stroke her feathers, and looks sideways at Rayla. She gives no sign of noticing.

No time to think about it, anyway: there’s a boat moored in the darkness and not much time to get it moving. Together, they flee.


	7. [1-5] drown. (Callum)

They realize it all at once: there’s a shadow under the water.

The boat doesn’t just go over. The boat gets _flung_.

When they hit the water, it knocks the wind out of Callum. Maybe it’s the impact, or the shock of cold, or the awful soul-deep _yank_. Stella is just slightly too far from him, struggling through the water, flapping lamely to paddle to him. He gasps and struggles back to her, mindless with an instant’s panic that she’ll be swept away. A jay is so light.

He scoops her back onto his shoulder, and the feel of her little claws against his wrist is like a ray of sunshine. It’s like everything is all right. Amais has turned to a beaver and swum to Ezran, who doesn’t even reach for him, doesn’t scramble to keep him close. They’re safe like this: Amais can be a water creature as readily as he can be a bird, still. They paddle together, two little bedraggled brown shapes in the river.

Stella scrambles onto Callum’s head, a better vantage point to keep sight of Ezran, and he focuses on getting them back to shore.


	8. [1-5] blades. (Rayla)

He keeps looking at her sideways, out the corner of his eye, when he seems to think she won’t notice. He’s always wrong. Humans are _laughably_ clumsy, slow and broadcasting every move, and Callum seems to be the worst of them. Even Ezran could have a better knack for stealth.

At first, she thinks he’s gawking at her like some exotic bird. At her horns, at her hands. She rolls her eyes and doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it.

But in every quiet moment, every time Ez is goofing around and not watching his brother-- Callum is looking at her. With this sad, _searching_ look in his eyes.

After a few days of it, she snaps.

“Cut it out!” She whirls on him, loud and exasperated, and he jumps about a foot. He gulps, tugs at his scarf, casts around for excuses. She watches him do it with her arms folded and one eyebrow raised. Rayla is really good at broadcasting “unimpressed.” He deserves it about eighty times a day.

“I was just-- uh--”

“Staring at me?” she demands.

He deflates. “At… your daemon.” There is a beat of silence, in which she can’t form a thought to put to the air. Callum rubs awkwardly at his arm and looks away. “How you don’t have one.”

Rayla stares for a second, trying to decide how she’s meant to respond to that, then lands upon indignation. She frowns back at him. “Of course elves don’t have little beasts we tow around with us. None of us do.”

“It’s a human thing!” he exclaims, in hurried agreement. “Totally get that. It’s just, uh… the first time I’ve seen it in person.”

Her impatient glare does not waver from him. He winces.

“It’s the first time,” he says, softer now, “I’ve met someone without one. Without… a soul.”

He has his hand up to his shoulder, his soft untrained fingers brushing the feathers of his little burst. Rayla bristles. “Without a soul?”

“Sorry! Sorry, that was wrong--” He waves hurriedly, flustered, off-kilter. “I just… you’re not like they told us you would be.”

She has to bite back the snarky response to that. She’s silent for a moment, thinking.

You’re not what I thought you’d be, either, she doesn’t say. It feels like too much of a confession. Like… weakness.

Instead she takes a deep breath in and out. “Elves may not have your little beasts, but we do have souls.” She quirks him a proud little smile while he blinks in surprise. “We forge them for ourselves.”

He blinks at her as she whirls her sheathed blades into her hands, then flicks them free. The carved faces shine beautifully in the gentle forest light.

Callum steps forward to see, cautious, and she lets him. She can’t help the little thrill of pride as he tilts his head to examine her blades, a confused sort of awe spelled out across his face.

“You made these?” he says.

“Of course,” she says, not a little proudly. “When a Moonshadow elf comes of age, she crafts a weapon in the shape of her soul. My blades are...” She looks down at them and feels the warmth on her face. “A part of me.”

“So every elf knows metalsmithing?” He was really impressed now. Good; an elven coming-of-age required a lot more skill than simply having a colorful pet.

“Well,” she hedges, tipping her head, “we do have master smiths to guide us. Like...”

Her voice falters. Her expression falls. She can see Callum’s eyes on her, his open and interested expression, but she can’t quite find her way back to the confident smile.

 _Like Ethari,_ she doesn’t finish. Like the day she was thirteen, and already faster and stronger than anyone her age in the glade, and the man who raised her steadied her hand against the burn of the forge. Showed her how to draw out the mithril, and how to etch it with her shapes, to suit the curves and edges of her own horns. To make it _hers_.

Some stupid, young part of her still wants to be in the forge with him now. For him to guide her hands, and smile at her through the heat pouring off the sacred metal. It made it so easy not to be afraid. Now it’s just her and her blades, pretty but useless in some stupid human forest, having never drawn a drop of blood.

“It’s… an elf thing,” she finishes, arms drawn in closer to herself. Callum is still looking at her blades. She flicks them away again, slides them back to their holstered place. “Way better than having a little songbird pet.”

Callum and his bird trade glances.

“It is pretty cool,” pipes up Ezran, popping up from the bushes with twigs in his hair and his delicate human soul shaped like a cricket on his forehead. Callum and the bird both whirl around with twin yelps of surprise, and Rayla has to stifle her laugh.


	9. [1-5] dungeon. (Viren)

“So,” says Viren, archly polite, “what are your concerns?”

Gren clears his throat. He hedges. He chooses his words.

“Well,” he starts, very diplomatic, “you took me off the mission.”

Viren hums assent. The goshawk on his shoulder shuffles her wings in what might be amusement. “Noted,” he says, “go on.”

At his feet, Lily sighs, so that Gren doesn’t have to. He goes on.

“And you threw me in this dungeon.”

The shackles on his wrists are uncomfortable. The collar around Lily’s neck is worse, though. Not that Viren put it _on_ her—gods, no, the man hasn’t been _that_ degree of inhospitable. The guards had handed it to Gren, silent and expectant.

But they hadn’t put it on her. Hadn’t _touched_ her. So surely there was room for some reason, here.

Lily sighs again. He thinks this time it might be at him.

“Your feedback,” says Viren, with something like a little bow, “is a gift.”

The goshawk is definitely laughing, this time.


	10. [1-6] ice. (Callum)

The egg crashes through the ice, and Ezran jumps in.

Amais follows in the shape of a polar bear cub, like it’s easy as anything. Stella shouts at the same moment Callum does, and they both throw themselves at the water—but Rayla catches him back, and Stella is left fluttering desperate around his head.

“Your bird can’t swim!” she tells him. “He’ll get it. He’ll save the egg.”

When they hear the knocking on the ice, they scramble to meet him. Rayla hits and hits and hits the ice until it breaks, and Ez bobs up, limp and soaked. He clutches the egg to him like it’s his daemon, like he can’t bear to let it go—even as Amais drifts, half-conscious, beside him.

Callum helps Rayla drag Ez out, but Amais is still in the water, not even trying to scramble up. Eyes not even open. Stella alights on his fluffy shoulder and digs in her tiny claws, flaps wildly, a jay trying to lift a bear cub.

Rayla starts towards the cub, but Callum yells before he can stop himself.

“Don’t!”

She jerks back, looks at him in wide-eyed... something, he doesn’t know what the emotion is, doesn’t know what a daemonless person feels when they’re told not to… not to…

Callum swallows hard, reaches into the icy water, and scoops out his brother’s soul. Touching the bear’s fur feels like holding a live wire or an exposed nerve, electric and _wrong_ , and Callum nearly drops him again.

Amais doesn’t stir, and that’s when panic really floods him.

Callum lets go and backs off the moment the bear cub is on solid ice, and Stella flutters forward in his place, to nudge at the cub with her beak. He turns to his brother, sprawled limp on the ice.

“Ez?” He’s shaking. He still feels the echo of Amais’s electric fur in his hands. “Ez, you did it.”

Nothing.

Desperate, Stella pecks Amais right on the head. The bear trembles, and Ez’s eyelids flutter. Callum feels his heart jump.

“Please,” he says, soft. “Just say something.”

His little brother cracks blue eyes open, and Amais takes a sudden breath in.

“I,” mumbles Ez, with the first hints of a little laugh, “I think I got a case of the frozie-toesies.”

Callum and Stella each press in close and don’t want to let go.


	11. [1-7] sunfire. (Callum)

“Greetings, fellow humans!” crows Rayla, delighted with a cowl up and her horns hidden. “Human fellows!”

“That’s pretty good, actually,” says Ez. “But… what about… your daemon?”

Callum winces. He knows what she’s said, that elves aren’t _supposed_ to… but it seems somehow cruel to point it out, how alone she is. Ez’s eyes are all wide and innocent, nothing but curious.

Rayla blinks at them. Then she rallies again.

“Right! My little beast that I can never get away from! I sure do like having one of those. They’re just… very small! And _hidden_.”

“It works,” chirps Ez, with a nod.

Callum isn’t so sure.

It’s later, when they’re in the crowd—and even though he keeps waiting for it, no one seems to look close enough to see what’s wrong with Rayla—that he really thinks about it.

Because she stops them to watch the fight. The fight with the special knife. It glows red-gold, carved with patterns just as intricate as her blades, etched all over with runes. The way she looks at it makes him stop, makes him watch her instead of the fight.

There’s this look on her face. Awe, amazement, but something else too—something he doesn’t understand. It’s dark, and maybe sad. Or maybe bitter.

“What is that?” he asks her, leaning in with Stella on his shoulder.

“It’s a Sunforge blade,” she says. She’s still not smiling, and her hands are in her cloak. He wonders, with a spark of worry, if they’re drifting to her own blades. “In Xadia, Sunfire elves can make magic weapons...”

He wonders, for a moment, if it’s like her own knives. But a daemon can’t exist without its person, so a soul-weapon must… vanish when its maker dies, or something, right? … Right? 

It feels dangerous to ask. They let her go to find the knife guy, and see if his magic knife can help her.

It doesn’t.

She doesn’t say anything else about it.


	12. [2-5] unsettled. (Viren)

“I apologize for my lateness,” says a little voice, and Viren turns.

Into the Pentarchy chamber comes a young girl, her daemon a light-furred squirrel on her shoulder. Circe swivels her head to look, fixing red eyes on the little creature. In his mind, she scoffs: _a rodent for a queen?_

Around him, the kings and queens exclaim fondly, they bow, they make pleasantries. The child-queen steps closer, to bow her greeting, and the squirrel shifts to golden songbird. Viren blinks.

Unsettled, still. And no adult at her side. Curious.

“I intend no offense,” he begins, and watches her expression close off as he does. Her little songbird eyes his hawk daemon, and drops to the ground as a sandy-furred cat at her ankle. Hm.

“It seems I am a crown without an adult,” she chirps, pleasantly polite, “and you are an adult without a crown. Let’s just begin.”

The kings and queens follow her lead. Viren tries and fails not to scowl. On his shoulder, Circe has drawn herself up sleek and rigid. It’s hunting posture, from a hawk.

“Very well,” he says, stiffly. Give him a child, then. He will tell her a children’s tale.


	13. [2-6] heart. (Viren)

When the titan falls, it crumbles to magma and stone, and it leaves behind something… beautiful.

The heart does not simply _glow_. It shimmers with gold light, with a sort of glittering radiance, and with a jolt he recognizes the quality of it: it looks the way a daemon does when it dies. Gold dust and the glow of a spirit. It is what life must look like, or soul, in its most fundamental shape.

He knows because he has seen countless men fall, their daemons snuffed out like candle flames. And he knows because he sees that same gold shine every time he draws the life out of a magical creature. Whatever that shimmer is, it is the fuel of all Dark Magic.

The men crowd up around the heart, tense and breathless in their victory, but they all flinch to touch it. They know. Something about it is plainly like daemons, and to touch it feels… wrong. In a familiar, awful way.

But no matter. There is work to do.


	14. [3-1] magma. (Amaya)

Amaya wrenches the Sunforge sword from the elf’s hand, and she sees the woman’s expression change.

No matter. She is here to the end of this. She sends her horse running, and points the sword at its owner. Where before the elf had been collected, tactical, now she _screams_ : she bellows rage and charges like a beast, frenzied, glowing with fire and fury.

Amaya throws the sword. She finds her mark in the explosives barrel.

She watches the horror, the terror on the elf’s face, and she does not quite feel glad. But she does feel _satisfied_. It is finished.

The world explodes into fire and a bone-deep _BOOM_.

As it settles, Amaya is surprised to find herself still in two pieces. Sala is the first to rise, a little shakily, on elegant but unsteady legs. Amaya grasps one of her horns to help lever herself back to her feet. They breathe together.

Then she sees the elf. Weaponless, now, she dangles one-handed from the edge of the cliffside. The sea of magma shifts slowly below.

 _She is our enemy,_ thinks Sala.

 _But we are not cruel,_ thinks Amaya. And she crouches down again to offer a hand.

No one has ever glared at her with such profound vehemence. For a moment, she thinks the elf will choose to fall.

But then that hand clasps hers. Sala sighs, in her mind, but Amaya knows that they are agreed. They help their enemy to her feet, and turn to face capture.


	15. [3-2] king. (Ezran)

When Ezran steps back into the throne room, Amais is a lion at his side. Dark-furred like Dad’s daemon, but smaller, with too-big feet and a scruffy fluff of a mane. A kid, like Ezran.

 _It might help,_ Amais told him. _It might help them listen to us. And it might help us feel strong like Dad._

When they offer him the crown, Amais sits beside the throne as the lion cub: a young shadow of Rowan who sat there before. It feels wrong to them. But this all does, and it isn’t hurting anybody, so what’s one more wrong thing?

It’s already more difficult, the next day.

The guards won’t let him go anywhere alone, and he knows he’s supposed to walk and talk all polite when they’re there. He knows Amais shouldn’t change, when they’re there. Even if they’re not grown-up yet, this is a grown-up thing they have to do—so the more they can show people they’re capable of it, the better.

Soren and Claudia look so sad, when they see him in his dad’s crown and Amais in his dad’s form. Especially Claudia.


	16. [3-5] touch. (Callum)

It’s a surreal night. Wild and exhilarating and… just kind of crazy.

The Ambler moves slow and steady, in long gentle rises and falls, less like a horse’s gait and more like a sailing ship—except Rayla doesn’t seem to mind it. The desert is dark and cool around them, stretching out to each horizon like a sea. Far below is the occasional glimmer of green: the soulfang’s glow, winking in the sand like little poisonous stars.

Nyx leaves them alone. That’s good, because Callum can’t really pay attention to much. Rayla is way too distracting.

She pulls him close against her in the darkness, so that he’s incredibly aware of the warmth of her. Her breath is a little cool against his lips. Do elves run a different temperature? Is that normal? Have any humans ever had a chance to find out, before now?

Her skin is so soft. The fabric she wears is impossibly fine and smooth, and he doesn’t know where to put his hands—like, at all. He rests one lightly… on her shoulder? But, like, kind of further back, like on her shoulder _blade_ —he’s afraid to move it because maybe it’ll break the moment and she’ll realize that he has no idea how kissing works.

Stella is dizzy and restless on his shoulder, he can feel it through the bond. She wants a daemon to cuddle up against, to preen and press to. But Rayla… doesn’t have one.

It makes his stomach drop, to think it, even after all this time. Makes him falter and pause. Rayla draws away.

Her eyes are amazing in the moonlight. He just kind of… stares at them, his face hot and his lips wet from _her_ lips and wow Callum just feels completely wrecked. He is so bad at this. He is so happy.

“Callum,” she murmurs, and she reaches out to touch his cheek. Her hand is cool. Four fingers, all of them impossibly soft for someone who can scale mountains and slay monsters. He shivers.

“And… Stella,” she says, soft and fond, and he blinks his eyes open when her hand moves.

When her hand…

_Oh._

It hits him like a punch to the gut. It hits him like lightning: too _intense_ to hurt, a live-wire shock through his whole body. What’s surreal is how still the moment is: Rayla’s light, beautiful eyes right there in front of him, up close, in the moonlight. And her hand is _on Stella_.

He lets out a breath, all at once. It might be a gasp. It might be a whimper. Stella does some kind of little choked-off trill of shock, at the feel of those soft gentle fingers _carding through her feathers oh gods—_

Callum wrenches himself away and gasps for breath like he’s surfacing from some incredible depth. Stella flutters like she needs to regain her balance. In the aftermath, everything is tingly and over-sensitized in some part of him he can’t reach. Callum swallows hard and reaches up to stroke Stella anyway, to smooth her feathers right again with the familiar feeling of his hand.

Rayla draws away, blinking.

“Whoa,” stammers Callum. “Whoa, whoa—uh—haha, wow, yeah! Is that what we’re doing?” His voice has gone up an octave. Stella crowds up against his neck like she wants to hide there, like they want to hide in each other. Rayla is staring at them. “Not—not that we _can’t_ , I’m just, uh, getting used to the idea! Of… moving this fast! Because this is… a little fast! And you… don’t… have a daemon, right, which makes this a little complicated...”

His voice keeps pitching higher, more apologetic, half a question. His smile must be the world’s most nervous smile. His lips are still wet. Callum is somehow deeply sure that he _cannot_ touch them or it will ruin everything.

But she touched his daemon.

 _Rayla_ touched his _daemon_.

Wow.

 _Are we okay with this?_ Stella thinks, sharply. _I don’t know if we’re okay with this._

Callum doesn’t know anything at all, right now. He works on getting his breath back and dropping the frantic smile.

“Uh…” When he looks up again, Rayla has tilted her head at him like he’s grown a second head. “Are you… okay? Was that—” her ears press low, her expression shades towards defensive, and his stomach drops, “wrong? _You_ kissed _me_ —”

“No!” He squawks it, hands coming up to wave it off. “Just… a little intense. Let’s maybe… not go that fast?”

“Is it that I petted your bird?” Her tone is incredulous, which sounds pretty in her accent but makes his heart sink even more. “If you didn’t want me to, you could have said. Or she could’ve.”

Callum and Stella look at each other.

And back at Rayla.

“Oh, boy,” says Stella. “This is going to be complicated.”

He whirls to shush her, but she flutters off his shoulder and onto the edge of the Ambler’s saddle. A little further back from Rayla—out of reach. Callum turns to look at the elf, his face burning.

She’s frowning at him, tense in the darkness. And frowning at Stella, for retreating.

“It’s a human thing,” says Callum, and steps forward to take her hands in his again. She looks up into his eyes, and there’s confusion and hurt there, but that’s okay. They’re working on this. “Touching daemons is… intense. It’s the most intense thing you can do.”

This time _she_ blushes.


	17. [3-6] whispers. (Soren)

The soldiers are restless. There’s been a rumor going around about the bug.

Viren pays it no mind. He scoffs, impatient, when Claudia tries to ask about it. He barely spares Soren a glance.

But Soren isn’t _that_ stupid. He can hear the rumors. And the rumors are… not very good.

“...made himself a new daemon...” someone is saying, just behind him, almost drowned out by hoofbeats and chatter. Soren falls back as far as he can get away with, to listen. Atlas falls back even further, and his big ears are _made_ for this.

“Magic can’t _make_ you a daemon,” another soldier says, annoyed. Horrified. “That would be… not human. What would you call someone with a daemon they _made_?”


	18. [3-9] alone. (Viren)

Viren wakes to the knowledge that everything is wrong.

He bolts upright, and finds himself in unfamiliar, stony darkness. His hands are badly bruised. His clothes are badly tattered. Circe—

That is when he panics.

“What? What’s going on?” He finds Claudia before him, Claudia with black eyes and white hair and Asher drooped, half-bleached and shuddering, about her shoulders. The snake doesn’t even seem awake or aware.

“Where is Circe?” he says, as Claudia’s eyes clear. “Where—”

“You’re alive,” she says, soft and wondering. She smiles. Her daemon is as limp as a bit of rope around her throat. It looks wrong. Everything feels—

The crown is on the ground, bent and badly bloodied.

Circe is nowhere.

“Somehow, I…” It doesn’t make sense. He touches his aching face. He cannot touch the aching, empty place in him. It feels as though he’s missing a limb. “I survived the fall?”

He sees it on Claudia’s face.

“No,” she says. “You... didn’t.”

She steps forward, reaches for him. He gasps. He doesn’t mean to. He…

Circe is—

“You’re okay now,” says his daughter, the half of her that’s conscious, that seems alive. There is bile in his throat. He is _not_ okay, he… his _daemon_ is—

He fumbles for the other presence, the weight around his shoulders. Nothing. His breath catches again. “Where is—”

Claudia’s expression sours. She points to the glowing chrysalis, and there is a bizarre spark of hope deep in his gut. Aaravos is still with him. He’s not alone.

He is broken. But he is not alone.


	19. guide.

**Callum** | jay | female | Stella  
 **Ezran** | unsettled | male | Amias  
 **Rayla** | her blades

**Harrow** | lion | male | Rowan  
 **Viren** | goshawk | female | Circe

**Soren** | red deer | male | Atlas  
 **Claudia** | snake | male | Asher

**Amaya** | oryx | female | Sala  
 **Gren** | irish setter | female | Lily

**Aaravos** | unclear

**Corvus** | hawk | female  
 **Opeli** | badger | male  
 **Crowmaster** | guess | male  
 **Ellis** | unsettled | male  
 **Queen Aanya** | unsettled | female  
 **Prince Kasef** | wild dog | male


End file.
